A writer with a nose for trouble

In between dodging bullets as Vanity Fair's star foreign correspondent, the author of The Perfect Storm has written the most original crime book since In Cold Blood, inspired by a personal link with the Boston Strangler

Though he presumably never imagined this would be the case, Sebastian Junger has made a career out of perfection. Just over a decade ago, the then fledgling journalist and full-time tree-feller received a modest $35,000 advance for a book that had already been rejected by six publishers. Before long, it had been turned into a Hollywood blockbuster and made him a millionaire; there are, even now, more than four million copies of his first book in print.

The Perfect Storm examined the notion that an act of nature of violently historic proportions could be classified as 'perfect'. In his new book, A Death in Belmont, an account of a famous murder that is already earning comparisons with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Junger unpicks the tidy reasonings of a perfect story to get at the violence beneath.

One day in 1962, before Junger was a year old, a photograph was taken. It shows Junger sitting on his mother's lap, and, standing behind them, two labourers who had just completed work on an extension to Junger's parents' house. Only two of the four subjects are looking directly at the camera: the baby and a stocky, smooth-haired man behind him, Albert DeSalvo.

The day before the photo was taken, a woman named Bessie Goldberg had been murdered in her home just down the road in their quiet Boston suburb. It was the first-ever homicide in Belmont and it was assumed to be the work of the Boston Strangler. Many years later, DeSalvo confessed to being the Boston Strangler.

But the story doesn't end with that terrifying coincidence; though he admitted to having killed 13 others, DeSalvo didn't confess to Goldberg's murder. And while the modus operandi was similar enough for the police to presume Goldberg's death was part of the series, another man, a black petty criminal named Roy Smith, had already gone down for it. Later, DeSalvo retracted his confession. Both he and Smith died in prison; in A Death in Belmont, Junger asks: who did what?

Over the years, this story has become simplified Junger family lore: Sebastian's mother has spoken of the moment she now regards as her brush with death and it is assumed that an innocent man was imprisoned. Other families have felt otherwise; a few weeks before A Death in Belmont was due to be published in the US, Bessie Goldberg's daughter spoke publicly about her mother's death for the first time.

'It's bad enough that she was murdered, but Sebastian Junger will make millions on a tragedy that was absolutely settled,' she said. Junger has responded with gracious generosity ('She really suffered and she merits being heard'). But, he argues, this is 'a book about ambiguity'.

Junger had always been interested in the story, yet in the course of his research, he found that the facts only got messier and more unwieldy. Which is another way of saying perfect, because that's exactly the kind of thing Junger knows how to handle.

Just last week, a US magazine described Junger as 'journalism's rock star roughneck'. A thinner, shorter, dark-haired, better-looking version of Bruce Willis, with a strong jaw and searing blue eyes, Junger has been photographed holding a chainsaw, he's been photographed shirtless and he's been shot (in both senses) while wearing a flak jacket. He is also, somehow, indelibly associated with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg who starred in the film of his spectacularly bestselling book. As for comparisons with Truman Capote... well, let's just say that Junger's feminine side tends not to be advertised.

His affability, however, is famous. He is rumoured to have lent his friends money when they've been behind on their rent, and Doug Stumps, his editor at Vanity Fair, where Junger is a contributing editor and star foreign correspondent, says: 'Sebastian is the nicest person you would ever want to meet. The guy would give you his last dollar if he thought you needed it.'

It is perhaps this spirit of conviviality that led Junger to open the Half-King, a pub and restaurant in Manhattan that proudly serves pints of Irish beer. Junger, who lives in New York with his wife, Daniela, co-owns the place with documentary maker Nanette Burstein (co-director of the inspired Robert Evans biopic, The Kid Stays in the Picture) and novelist and war correspondent Scott Anderson.

Named after an 18th-century native American chief who played George Washington off against the French, the Half-King stands on a busy corner in Chelsea, opposite an all-night petrol station and just steps away from some of the world's most expensive contemporary art. Owned by writers and designed for writers, it is a wildly popular venue, frequented nightly by hordes of New Yorkers whose main literary outlet is the writing of their phone number on the back of a Guinness beermat.

With some of the other proceeds from The Perfect Storm, Junger set up a charity. In that book, he wrote about the alcoholism in the Massachusetts town from which the fishermen disappeared. Gloucester is a fishing port that had, when Junger moved there, fallen on dispiritingly hard times. Junger's charity, the Perfect Storm Foundation, offers educational support to the children of commercial fishermen, thereby giving something back to the town whose loss made him inadvertently famous.

Some of Junger's rugged reputation is real. Years ago, while working up a tree in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Junger suffered the effects of momentary carelessness with a chainsaw. He looked down to find his leg cut open and his Achilles tendon bare. It was such an unusual injury that afterwards, in the operating theatre, he overheard the surgeon say to the nurse: 'What do I do with this piece?'

While recovering, he started thinking about writing a book on dangerous professions - logging, commercial fishing, drilling for oil. Junger noted that there was something of a class divide between those who have no choice but to work in danger and those who court danger as a pastime. As extreme sports gained popularity among those who could afford to pursue them, Junger imagined a chronicle of these more forgotten people's lives. The Perfect Storm began as a chapter on fishermen.

One reason Junger is able to pull off such dexterous literary feats is that he is as unafraid of complex meteorological details as he is of near-death activities and has accepted the stylistic bequests of New Journalism. His ruggedness is not everything. While he has earned a living as a logger, he is, by origin, closer to those who have other choices. He is the son of an Ohio-born artist and a Russo-Austrian physicist who escaped the Nazis and went to Harvard. He has a degree in cultural anthropology. Junger is honest about this; he has never claimed to be at risk to the same degree as his subjects. When covering wars, he has, in his own phrase, 'rarely lacked a quick way out'.

Yet risk is clearly a concept he embraces philosophically as well as physically. A keen poker player, Junger is, according to his agent and friend, Stuart Krichevsky, motivated by 'things that terrify him'. 'It's also about the fear of failure,' Krichevsky has said. 'He has told me that he needs to be absolutely terrified that he can't possibly do what's asked of him.'

In July 1993, Junger flew to Austria, walked into the office of Associated Press and asked if they needed anyone in Bosnia. They said no. He went anyway.

'I think it's fair to say I had no idea what I was doing,' he later wrote about this leap. Junger still wonders what leads onlookers to such danger. 'People are drawn to those situations out of an utterly amoral sense of awe that has nothing to do with their understanding of the larger tragedy,' he writes in his essay collection, Fire

Since that first trip, Junger has been to Kosovo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, among other hot spots, for Vanity Fair (in the April issue, he goes for the third time to cover what he terms 'the forgotten war' in Afghanistan). His ability to select journalistic subjects is 'uncanny' says Doug Stumps. 'He latches on to a place before anyone is interested in it and then he hands his piece in and all of a sudden it's on the front page of the New York Times.'

Yet his two full-length books have both been inspired by events closer to home. The 'perfect storm' took place while he was living in Gloucester and the Boston Strangler story landed in his lap, as surely as he sat in his mother's that day after Bessie Goldberg died.

Junger has said that if he had to choose between foreign reporting and writing books, he would choose the former without hesitation. But he's less keen to risk his life than he once was. 'I can't go to Iraq,' he told Newsweek a fortnight ago. 'I don't want to do that to my wife. She now has veto power, so I have to run things by her. I proposed Haiti, but she said, "No, Haiti is not on the list."'

While he awaits her approval, he'll have to be content to stride into the eye of a literary storm, all over again.

The Junger lowdownBorn Sebastian Junger, 17 January 1962, Belmont, Massachusetts, to Ellen and Miguel Junger. One younger sister, Carlotta. Married to Daniela, who was working as a consultant to the UN when they met in 2002 at a talk he gave about prostitute trafficking in eastern Europe. They live in Manhattan.

Worst of times: A tree-felling accident in 1991; a surfing accident in 1994; being suspected of being an American spy in Liberia, 2003; being shot at in Afghanistan earlier this year.

Best of times: The huge, instant success of The Perfect Storm, published in 1997, lending him the profile to secure his dream of reporting on foreign affairs.

What he says: (about Hollywood) 'There are many measures of literary success, but none that involves a world writers spend so much time claiming to disdain. To wait for a phone call from one of these people would violate every illusion the reading public hold dear about their authors. And so we slip off to Hollywood as quietly as possible, hoping our betrayal will somehow pass unnoticed.'